News: Dr Biyani's work accepted to participate in MicroTAS 2009 to be held on Nov 1-5, 2009 in Jeju, Korea ------- Dr Biyani's work accepted to publish in Nucleic Acids Research, Oxford Journal (May 2009) ------- Dr Biyani hosts a Indo-Japan symposium on "Nanotechnology and Health-care" in Biyani Girls College, India on Sept 20-22, 2009 ------- Dr Biyani wins bursary and travel grant from DST, India to attend XX International Congress of Genetics in Berlin (July, 2008)

µGE/µTGGE: Micronization of gel electrophoresis with 100-fold productivity

Gel electrophoresis (GE) is a landmark technology in separation science. Temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (TGGE) is current one of the primary means of DNA shape analysis, in addition to their size anaylsis. Temperature (and denaturant) causes structural changes in DNA and structural changes substantially affect their mobility in gel electrophoresis, therefore, TGGE can be used for structural analysis of DNAs.

Because of its simplicity, economy and ease of use, TGGE has been developed to provide a universal platform for identifying species by genotypes. However, the performance of TGGE technology is, though highly informative, limited in its ability due to methodological reasons, so it requires the development of faster and less expensive methods.

We, at Nishigaki laboratory (Saitama University), have developed a one-inch-sized microfabricated gel system suitable for DNA analysis. This apparatus was shown to be of high performance and to have potentials to apply to versatile purposes mainly due to its faster nucleic acid separation with a similar or better resolution than conventional gel systems.

The GE of multi-wells as well as TGGE was successfully performed with both DNAs and proteins. We demonstrates that miniaturization of the gel down to around one-tenth of its conventional size can be successfully introduced, resulting in a hundred-fold higher performance (total evaluation of time and degree of parallel operations) than that of the conventional. Miniaturization also results in a substantial cost reduction because of the small quantities of reagents and samples that would be required.

Secondary GE operation at the micro level was also shown to be effective by introducing micronized GE (µGE/µTGGE). Through these technological developments, genome analysis has become greatly facilitated and thus µGE/µTGGE holds great potential to trigger developments in various biological fields.

 

Fig. A schematic drawing of mGE (left) and mTGGE (right) prototype apparatus.

  

   References:
    • Manish Biyani and Koichi Nishigaki (2001) Hundred-fold Productivity of Genome Analysis
          by Introduction of Micro-Temperature Gradient Gel Electrophoresis. Electrophoresis 22(1), 23-28.
    • Manish Biyani, Hiroshi Nishizawa, Yoshihide Miyatani,Eiichi Kanaumi, Pharhad Eli, Yasunori Kinoshita,
          and Koichi Nishigaki (2001) Micronized Gel Electrophoresis: Construction and Its Versatile Applications.     Chemistry letters, 2, 138-139.